State of Sustainability Podcast

Solo Episode: Volatility and the Future of the Sustainability Professional

SAIF: Welcome to another episode of the State of Sustainability. I'm your host Saif Hamid.

In this episode, we're going to talk about the role of volatility in a business context, and why volatility is the next big horizon for the sustainability professional. I'll touch on what the future holds for sustainability functions as they exist today, why much of the current work sustainability professionals do is likely to be automated or absorbed by other functions over time, what volatility means for business, why it's rising, and why I think it's the right place for sustainability professionals to focus.

The Three Forces Pressuring the Sustainability Function

I'm hot off the State of Sustainability Summit in Chicago, where I hosted around 40 to 50 sustainability professionals from the world's largest food and beverage companies. One of the questions I've started asking in every room I'm in is: how many people believe the sustainability function will still exist as a standalone unit in five years?

In London last autumn, about 10% of the room said yes. In Chicago this year, about 25% said yes. Bear in mind these are rooms full of sustainability professionals themselves. That tells you something about where the profession thinks it's headed.

I tend to agree with the hypothesis — which is why I ask the question. There are three significant forces bearing down on the sustainability function's workflow, and I want to work through each one.

The first is functional migration. Much of the sustainability professional's role is simply moving to other parts of the business. CFOs are getting more involved — some surveys suggest 90% of Fortune 500 CFOs expect sustainability to become a major focus of their role. CPOs are not far behind, with around 80% expecting sustainability ambitions to factor into their KPIs. Supply chain, procurement, finance, and operations teams are all assuming greater ownership of pieces of the sustainability agenda.

In one sense, this is a sign of success — it's genuinely good that sustainability is being owned more broadly across the organisation. But it does reduce the need for a standalone sustainability function with ring-fenced subject matter expertise.

A related data point I find striking: according to LinkedIn, approximately 53% of "green hires" now go to non-green job titles. The majority of people self-classifying as having green skills are taking roles that don't market themselves as sustainability jobs. That could mean sustainability professionals are transitioning to other roles because the job market has contracted. It could also mean mainstream procurement, finance, and other professionals are upskilling in sustainability and taking those skills into their primary function. Either way, the osmosis of sustainability knowledge into other functions is accelerating — and the integrity of sustainability as a standalone unit is increasingly at risk.

The second force is automation. This one doesn't get enough attention. We've done a stack-ranking exercise at Altruistiq of the tasks sustainability professionals perform and mapped them against their automability. Running from data collection and aggregation all the way through to stakeholder relationship management, a large proportion of the sustainability workflow is already automatable or will be within a few years.

It's worth distinguishing between three layers here. There's traditional automation — digitising and systematising processes that were previously manual. Most carbon accounting software operates this way. Then there's AI-assisted work — using tools like Claude or ChatGPT to co-author reports, analyse data, or draft communications, with the human still integral to the output. And then there's agentic AI, where you've equipped an AI system with access to tools and the ability to execute autonomously. An agentic data collection workflow, for instance, might send messages to data owners, pull information from multiple systems, navigate queries, clean inputs, and deliver a consolidated output end to end — with minimal human involvement.

Across these three layers, a very large share of what sustainability professionals do today will be handled by machines within a few years. That's another structural challenge for the function's long-term viability in its current form.

The third force is more straightforward, and less of a silver lining: the macro backlash against sustainability. Regulation is still technically expanding — there is more sustainability regulation in force this year than at any previous point, and there will be more next year, driven by the sheer volume of requirements coming from the EU, California, New York, and other jurisdictions. But despite that, there is noticeably less of the ambitious, blue-sky thinking work that used to define the best sustainability roles. That work requires bold, long-range targets as a prerequisite. Without them, you get more of the mundane — the compliance treadmill — and less of the visionary.

I remember the Shell Sky Scenarios from around 2016 or 2017 as some of the earliest genuinely ambitious long-range thinking from a major corporation about what a credible decarbonisation path could look like. You still saw some of that energy carry through into the early 2020s. There's much less of it now. Most corporations have pulled back to what feels achievable in the near term. That's not entirely bad — pragmatism has value. But it does mean the most capable sustainability professionals have less interesting work to do, and that tends to drive talent out of the function.

Why Volatility Is the Right New Horizon

So: three forces eroding the standalone sustainability function. What's the right response?

I want to make the case that the best place to redirect sustainability skills is volatility management — and that sustainability professionals should increasingly think of themselves as volatility managers within their business.

The link is this: business sustainability is fundamentally about business resilience. And business resilience is impossible to maintain in a volatile operating environment. The sustainability professional's deepest value lies in managing the ongoing transformation process — helping a business keep reinventing itself as the ground shifts beneath it.

I have a mental image I keep returning to: those wobbly balance boards that were popular during COVID for use with standing desks. The idea is that you're constantly making micro-adjustments to stay balanced while strengthening your core. Businesses are going to need to operate on something very like that in the years ahead — not just occasionally, but as a permanent state. The question is: who builds the organisational muscle memory to stabilise quickly when things get unstable?

What Volatility Actually Looks Like

To be specific about what I mean by volatility in this context: I'm talking about price volatility in key commodity inputs, driven by external events. Price is the most useful lens because it aggregates supply shocks, quality issues, and delays into a single signal — ultimately you can source most things at some price, so price tells you where the stress is.

The numbers are striking. According to a BCG report I was reviewing, the number of days with high price variability — across rice, wheat, and cocoa — has reached record levels in recent years. Rice had 221 high-variability days in 2023 and 189 in 2024. Cocoa had 224 high-variability days in 2024. Wheat has averaged around 170 high-variability days over the last several years. These are the highest figures recorded since the start of the millennium. In most cases, we're talking about the majority of the year operating under high price volatility.

And variability is actually worse than sustained high prices. If prices are consistently elevated, you can model it, adjust your pricing, and manage margins. If prices are constantly moving, the business has to keep recalibrating. That instability is the harder thing to manage.

What's Driving the Volatility

Two main drivers, both substantiated in the BCG data.

The first is geopolitical and regulatory: wars, tariffs, trade disputes, political instability. The Ukraine war, the Iran conflict, the tariff environment — all of these have been significant recent drivers of commodity price disruption.

The second, and the one I want to spend more time on, is planetary boundaries.

The Potsdam Institute publishes a framework tracking nine vital signs of the planetary system: ozone depletion, atmospheric aerosol loading, ocean acidification, freshwater change, land system change, climate change, modification of biogeochemical flows, introduction of novel entities, and change in biosphere integrity. Seven of the nine are now in breach, and for all seven, the trend is towards higher risk and greater strain.

Two are actually improving: ozone depletion and atmospheric aerosol loading. That's genuinely encouraging, because it demonstrates that coordinated human action can work. The Montreal Protocol moved the needle on ozone depletion in a way that seemed implausible when I was studying it at school. When we coordinate, we can solve hard problems.

But the other seven are moving in the wrong direction. And what I find particularly unsettling about planetary boundary breaches is that we have no historical precedent for them. These boundaries are defined as the maximum thresholds experienced across the planet's history — so we are, by definition, in uncharted territory. We genuinely do not know what the second and third-order consequences will look like.

Take ocean acidification. If it continues beyond safe limits at scale, we're looking at potential devastation of marine ecosystems that we simply cannot model with confidence. The interconnections are too complex, the feedback loops too poorly understood. I know this because a client of mine spent significant time and resources trying to model it a few years ago and couldn't produce anything credible.

My point is that the volatility we are seeing now is the beginning, not the peak. Each planetary boundary breach will generate its own spate of disruption. As multiple boundaries are breached simultaneously to increasing degrees, they will interact with each other in ways that compound unpredictability. Most businesses do not currently have the internal muscle to navigate that — to understand what it means, to model the implications, and to adapt in real time as it unfolds.

The Skills That Transfer

Here is where sustainability professionals' existing skills become genuinely valuable in a new context. I see three core competencies, with a fourth layer on top.

Systems thinking and design. The ability to step back and imagine entirely new ways of doing things. Anyone who has worked seriously on circularity has developed deep systems thinking — you're not just moving a product to a consumer, you're designing the full loop including how it comes back and what happens to it. That's the kind of thinking that volatile environments demand.

Data analysis and insight. Much of the analytical work will be automated, but insight is something different. Insight requires knowing what a piece of analysis actually means, what it implies for this specific business in this specific context, and how to act on it. That blend of expertise is not automatable in the same way.

Storytelling and communication. The ability to build a narrative that lands. Sustainability professionals have developed this skill in environments where they had to translate complex, technical, and often abstract topics into language that moves people — boards, procurement teams, consumers, suppliers. That skill is directly transferable to communicating volatility risks and responses to a business audience.

On top of these three, I'd add business context. All three skills are more powerful when they're grounded in deep knowledge of the specific organisation. Someone who has spent ten or fifteen years inside Nestlé, who knows how the business has responded to past disruptions and can draw on that institutional memory, is far more effective than someone applying the same skills from the outside. Business context is what transforms competence into impact.

The Strategic Opportunity

A friend of mine with twenty years in agriculture said something to me recently that I keep thinking about: category leaders grow by growing the category; category leaders decline when the category declines. If you are Starbucks in coffee, or Mars or Nestlé in chocolate, and something happens to cocoa — your category shrinks. The preservation of the underlying commodity category becomes directly tied to your business's future. And that requires someone inside the business whose job is to think about exactly these issues.

The best thing that can happen for a sustainability professional right now is for sustainability-related questions to become questions that CEOs are being asked by shareholders. When that happens, you want to have the analysis ready, the playbook prepared, and the operational capability to execute it. That's how sustainability professionals demonstrate tangible, irreplaceable value in the years ahead.

To any sustainability professional watching their function contract: this is the substantive case for why your skills matter. The world is getting more volatile. The impact on business is getting heavier. The organisations that will navigate this best are the ones that build the internal capability to understand, model, and respond to it in real time. That capability looks a lot like what the best sustainability professionals already do.

I'll be exploring this further in the coming weeks and months, including deep dives into specific commodities. If you have thoughts, research, or real-world experience on this — direct message me on LinkedIn or email me at saif@altruistiq.com. I'd genuinely love to hear from you.

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